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More About the Aims: History Education, the New Historical Record, and the Idea of 'Source Lab'

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The publication of historical sources has always been a traditional part of the historian's craft.  Over time, however, this practice drifted out of undergraduate education in the US, with few departments making space in their curriculums for it.  There were reasons for this.  Documentary editing demands specialized skills and training.  In a world where original sources were often physically inaccessible in far away archives–and the definition of what counted as a historical source was relatively narrow–leaving the practice to academic presses and professional scholars perhaps made sense.  An instructor's main job was to select "the readings" and the student's main job was to read them.

But we no longer live in that world.  The new historical record being created on the Web is transforming both the size and the nature of history's source base.  Digitization makes inaccessible information suddenly accessible, objects multiply online by the second, and the kind of sources available is changing as fast as the number.  Personal papers as well as official acts, archives of the intimate and the marginalized as well as the public and the privileged, images, sounds, movies as well as texts: whole new worlds of the past are being made available to explore.  Neither scholarly presses nor professional researchers can keep pace with the scale of these changes, on their own. 



But why do we need a renewed attention to editing and publishing, if the Web is expanding all by itself and we can just read it? Isn't the raw availability of information provided by the Internet enough?

Not if we really want to understand the past.  Because you can't write good history with bad sources.  As wonderful as the new historical record being assembled by the Internet is, it seems almost fiendishly designed to strip its artifacts of their original context and place in the past.  Millions–billions?–of digitized documents occupy the no-man's land of our World War I film.  They appear to viewers without any information about who made them, why, for what purpose, with what results, or where they are preserved today. 

And a source whose origin, nature, importance and evolution over time you don't understand is the very definition of a bad source.  You can't trust the judgements about the past you make from such artifacts, until you understand their own history better.  In effect, the Internet has provided a solution to one traditional goal of historical publishing–getting people access to sources they need to understand the past–while sidestepping or even ignoring another: providing people with the context they need to use the sources to explore the past. 

And indeed, many instructors report that students are less interested in reading "the readings" than ever before: which if you think about it, only makes sense.  In a world where history is everywhere and nowhere–and in whose production they have no involvement–why bother to think about any one thing systematically or seriously?

The idea behind the SourceLab initiative, then, is that scholars have to address this problem, and that one great way to do it is to carve out an experimental space–a laboratory for the development of new modes of scholarly source publication–within undergraduate education.  Building good editorial practices back into the undergraduate experience won't annotate the whole Web of course.  But it will improve our ability to respond rapidly and continuously to the new historical records appearing on the Internet. 

Classroom teachers, researchers, and the public will have a place to identify new sources that interest them as they come, and history departments will have an expanded ability to prepare these documents for use, turning bad, de-contextualized sources into good ones.   Perhaps most importantly, by becoming the makers of good historical sources, students may well learn to read them more carefully and caringly, appreciating each bit of the historical record for what it alone has to say.

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  1. Introduction: Has this Ever Happened to You? John Randolph

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